Matthew Marks Gallery

In his preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth announces the necessity for a new kind of poetry. He resolves to “choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.” More than two centuries later, his then-revolutionary literary objective resonates throughout “La Carte d’après nature,” an expansive group exhibition curated by Thomas Demand. The artist derives the title from an art journal published sporadically by René Magritte between 1951 and 1965 that usually consisted of a mere postcard, which he addressed to friends and fellow artists. On one of the postcards, Magritte wrote Quel sens donnez-vous